Do literary critics have what it takes to review comics?

We’ve given a fair bit of space in Q&Q to conversations about literary criticism, but we’ve heard relatively little about what it means to be a critic of comics. Considering how significant graphic novels have become in Canadian literature and publishing, perhaps it’s time to address the question.

Where better to start the conversation than the comics scene itself. Michael May, writer of Kill All Monsters! Webcomic, sparked an interesting conversation about comics criticism over on the Robot 6 blog at Comic Book Resources. In his first post in a series dedicated to sketching out some basic guidelines for engaging in comics criticism, May suggests all comics are not created equally and encourages critics to take their cues from “authorial intent”:

By “author” I don’t mean just the writer, but everyone involved in the creative process. In comics that might only be one person or it could be a huge team. The point is that the people who make the comics have something that they’re trying to accomplish and good criticism of the book should take that into account. It’s not fair for me to open Dan Clowes’ Death Ray expecting it to be like Fantastic Four…. [T]o judge [a work] correctly, critics need to focus on what it is they think that [the authors] are trying to accomplish and whether or not it succeeds on that level.

In his second post, May tackles the issue of amateur criticism versus professional criticism, and suggests a critics’ credentials matter only insofar as they help a reader get what she needs out of the review, whether it be reading recommendations, a deeper understanding of the craft, or both.

The latest post by May offers tips to readers for evaluating a review based again on authorial intent: was the point of the review to entertain? To provide a product review? To contribute to the development of the craft? To curate a canon?

These aren’t new concepts or questions by any means, but May (unintentionally) raises another issue. Is comics criticism the same as literary criticism, and do literary critics who aren’t well-versed in the world of comics have the chops to write an informed review of a graphic novel?

Hélène Dorion named Officer to the Order of Canada

In a ceremony Friday morning, Governor General David Johnston bestowed the honour of Officer of the Order of Canada on francophone poet, novelist, and essayist Hélène Dorion. In a press release issued by the Governor General’s office, Dorion is described as “a leading figure in contemporary francophone literature” who has created an “impressive body of work in which she questions the very essence and unchanging nature of human beings.”

The author of Days of Sand (Cormorant Books), No End to the World (Guernica Editions), and The Edges of Light (Guernica), Dorion’s work has been translated in more than 15 languages. The Order is the latest in a series of prestigious honours and awards she has won throughout her career, including the Governor General Literary Award for Poetry (2006), the Prix Anne-Hébert (2004), and the Alain Grandbois Prize (1996). In 2005, she was the first female poet from Quebec to win France’s Mallarmé prize. Dorion was previously named a knight of the National Order of Quebec and a member of the Quebec Academy of Letters.

Scott Griffin brings poetry into Canadian schools

Canadian literary benefactor Scott Griffin is taking his passion for poetry – in particular, the live recitation of poetry – into schools across Canada with a new bilingual recitation contest that will award $10,000 to students and school libraries.

Griffin announced the initiative, known as Poetry in Voice, at a press conference in Toronto on Tuesday. A pilot program is currently underway at a dozen Ontario high schools, and the plan is to expand to Quebec in 2011–12 and across the country in 2012–13.

Griffin, who recites a favourite poem from memory at each annual Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist announcement, spoke of the importance of recitation in discovering poetry. “The best way to know a poem short of writing it is to memorize it,” he said. “It’s amazing how different emotional settings or scenes will resurrect that particular poem because it strikes exactly what you’re experiencing at the time.”

Griffin wants to change the negative attitude many people have toward the rote memorization of poetry. “We hope this program … will excite students to want to memorize [poetry], and then they will discover the value of the poem,” he said.

Students participating in the pilot program can choose three poems from an online anthology that currently comprises more than 100 English-language and 25 French-language poems in the public domain, as selected by Poetry in Voice director Damian Rogers (author of the collection Paper Radio, published by ECW Press) and three-time Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poet Pierre Nepveu.

According to Rogers, the contest will serve as a platform for bringing Canadian literature and contemporary poets into schools. “I want students to make the connection that poetry is part of the Canadian cultural landscape across the country,” said Rogers, who added that the group is currently in the process of securing rights to contemporary and Canadian poems.

Competing students will be judged according to a variety of criteria, including physical presence, voice and articulation, accuracy, and dramatization. Griffin says students who choose to recite at least one poem in their non-native tongue will have a slight advantage over other competitors.

The province-wide finalists will face off on April 12 at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre, with the winning student receiving $5,000, plus an additional $2,500 for the student’s school library. The runner-up will receive $1,000 (plus $500 for the library), while the third-place student will receive $500 (plus $500 for the library).

In addition to the $10,000 earmarked for the Poetry in Voice program, the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry will hand out $200,000 to the nominees of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize.

“Brooding on Muskoka chairs”: Brit Giller judge on Canadian literature

In the Sept. 12 edition of the Financial Times, British critic and novelist Victoria Glendinning, who sits on this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize jury (which announced its longlist yesterday), generously shared her thoughts on Canadian literature.

Following the claim that reading 100 works of Canadian literature was a “life enhancing experience,” Glendinning dives into a scathing critique of Canadian culture, publishing, and literature.

Some highlights from the article, via the Globe Books Blog:

The Canadian for gutter is “eavestrough” which is picturesque. Everyone is wearing a “tuque” or “toque” which in English-English suggests the lofty headgear worn by Queen Mary but is actually a little woolly hat. And in the holiday cottages among Ontario’s northern lakes and forests–evidently, the prime setting for emotional turmoil–they sit, brooding, on Muskoka chairs. (Look those up on the net.)

…

Apart from brilliant Giller contestants, there are … “unbelievably dreadful” ones. It seems in Canada that you only have to write a novel to get grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and from your provincial Arts Council, who are also thanked. Complaints were once voiced that most shortlisted Giller novels emanated from just three big-name publishers, all owned by Bertelsmann, and that virtually every winner lived in the Toronto area. Now, many of the submitted authors, and their rugged subject matter, hail from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland. That’s maybe because small publishers too are now subsidised, and they proliferate. If you want to get your novel published, be Canadian. 

Now, tell us what you really think, Glendinning! 

Steven Galloway to Barbara Kay: I’m a Canadian novelist and proud of it

Last week, National Post columnist Barbara Kay stirred up some controversy when she trashed Lisa Moore’s novel February for being both unmanly and unreadable – a symptom of what Kay describes as an overly feminized, government-coddled publishing industry. In today’s paper, author Steven Galloway offers a rebuttal, arguing that Kay’s literary sensibility just isn’t very, well, literary:

Ms. Kay’s complaint isn’t with Canadian literature, it’s with the lack of Canadian blockbuster commercial fiction. My suspicion is that Ms. Kay can’t tell the difference – how is it that she thinks the literature of our country differs from the literature of any other country? Most contemporary literature is overwhelmingly reflective, personal and not ripped from the headlines. And that’s the way it should be. Novels are not twitter, they are not sitcoms and they are not action movies, and the moment they are, literature ceases to exist.

On the issue of arts grants, which according to Kay create a culture of mediocrity and smug navel-gazing, Galloway has this to say:

Yes, Canadian literature is subsidized. So are tourism, mining, forestry, automobile production, small business and oil. In 2006 the petroleum industry alone received $1.4-billion in government subsidies in the form of tax breaks. I’ll apologize for our subsidies when they apologize for theirs, because what writers do is every bit as important and vital as putting together cars, docking cruise ships or cutting down trees.

Galloway’s response is a well-needed antidote to Kay’s over-heated polemics. But the tinge of elitism that creeps into his argument – he says the type of book Kay would like to see more of in Canada “may well be entertaining but it would be neither a novel nor literature” – is a little off-putting. Surely, if commercial fiction can’t aspire to literature, it at least qualifies as culturally meaningful. And many novels that subsequently earned a place in the canon were first conceived of as entertainments.

L.M. Montgomery’s sad end

For the second week in a row, the weekend brings news about the suicide of a well-known writer. Arguably as startling as the news last week that David Foster Wallace hanged himself at the young age of 46 is the revelation, in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, that Lucy Maud Montgomery, one of Canada’s most beloved authors, also killed herself, with a drug overdose at the age of 67.

The revelation was made in an essay by Montgomery’s granddaughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, who writes that she wants to bring Montgomery’s long battle with depression and its sad conclusion to light in the hopes that it will encourage more people suffering from mental illness to seek help:

I have great admiration for my grandmother, for her contribution to Canadian literature and culture, her strength of character, and the love, pride and sense of responsibility she gave to my family.

I am proud of her courage, given how isolated and lonely she must have felt during certain periods of her life. I wish that her family or community had had some of the tools that are available today. I expect that most families continue to be bewildered about how to help loved ones who suffer from debilitating depression.

I hope that by writing about my grandmother now there might be less secrecy and more awareness that will ease the unnecessary suffering so many people experience as a result of such depressions.

Sadly, Wallace’s recent decision to end his life after a lengthy bout with depression indicates that, while the stigma may be less prevalent in 2008 than during Montgomery’s lifetime, the disease still claims the lives of many people who can see no other way out of their circumstances.

Here’s hoping that next week will provide some literary news that is not suicide-related.

Is CanLit edgy?

A story in The Toronto Star asks whether contemporary Canadian literature is or isn’t “anti-urban and anti-modern in spirit, and inimical to experimental writers” – like Douglas Coupland, who sparked the debate with an online rant he penned for an article on New York Times Select, an online service available only by subscription. Coupland charged that CanLit “is when the Canadian government pays you to write about life in small towns and/or the immigrant experience.”

The Star‘s publishing reporter Judy Stoffman writes that Coupland “blamed entrenched, aging authors (none named) who suck up all the attention. The piece also takes aim at the system of government grants, supposedly limited to those who ‘follow CanLit’s guidelines.’ (Coupland has never received Canada Council money.)”

Publisher Patrick Crean of Thomas Allen & Son and Melanie Rutledge, head of the Canada Council writing and publishing section, argue in Stoffman’s piece that CanLit is edgy and that emerging writers are funded and published. But Toronto author Andrew Pyper, who has received grants from the council and also sat on a peer jury, agreed with Coupland up to a point. “We have done a very good job of creating a brand, a tone of fiction about distinctive Canadian topics,” he says. “But now, on the occasion of a new century, it might be useful to expand that brand, if not explode it altogether. Where I would part with Coupland is the blaming of the granting bodies.”

Quillblog reserves judgment until we can ask Alice Munro what she thinks about all this.

Related links:
Read The Toronto Star story here.

May the coverage begin

It’s only two days after the Governor General’s Awards shortlists were announced, and media coverage has already been plentiful. The Toronto Star‘s Philip Marchand weighs in on the lack of overlap between this year’s GG and Scotiabank Giller shortlists, noting the frequency of the phenomenon — it also happened in 1997 and 1994 — and citing the release of a large number of books that were great but not too great as the cause of it this year, while shining a spotlight on only one of them — A Perfect Night to Go to China by David Gilmour, chosen ostensibly for its author’s status as the only veteran novelist on the list who was born and raised in Canada.

Over at The Globe and Mail, Michael Posner approaches the shortlists’ lack of intersecting books in a more realistic way, citing the subjectivity (but not the politics) involved in selecting a nation’s greatest books for any given year. Posner devotes web space to all English fiction finalists but Golda Fried and reports on lessons learned by novelist, GG English fiction juror, and Globe columnist Russell Smith. “You know what a grump I am about Canadian literature,” said Smith on Monday. “I thought this would be my opportunity to find out what was wrong with it.” Instead, Posner reports Smith saying that the problem was “how good so many of the books were.”

The CBC Arts website also has what reads like a puffed-up list of all books nominated. So far, no one has really owned up to the politics of shortlists. Will the realist in the audience please stand up?

Related links:
Click here for Marchand’s piece in The Toronto Star
Click here for Posner’s piece in The Globe and Mail
Click here for the piece on CBC.ca

Remembering an early CanLit booster

Literature professor Gordon Roper, who died last month at the age of 93, is remembered in a Toronto Star obituary. A Peterborough native, Roper taught at the University of Chicago and then at U of T’s Trinity College — where he managed to sneak some Canadian content onto the reading list. As Star obituary writer Catherine Dunphy writes, Roper “hatched a plot with a colleague in the divinity school to devise a course of Canadian content he called ‘Spiritual Issues in Literature.’ ‘That’s how he got Canadian literature on to the syllabus,’ said Neufeld [James Neufeld, now chair of Trent University's English department]. ‘It was one of the best courses I ever took. I taught CanLit at Trent on the basis of that course.’”

Related links:
Click here for the obituary of Gordon Roper

An academic scolding for Canada Reads

With the CBC’s fourth annual Canada Reads program set to kick off on Feb. 21, a recent editorial on the Canada Reads phenomenon in the scholarly journal Canadian Literature is well timed. And writer Laura Moss has some serious concerns about the program, to say the least.

For one, she argues that the broadcast debates are strictly superficial: “the level of discussion rarely goes beyond character development, plot, or emotional response to the texts.” Some readers might agree that a meaningful discussion of aesthetics is sorely lacking from the discussion, but Moss argues that the most egregious absence isn’t aesthetics but politics. “The championing of Sarah Binks [in 2003] ignored historical context: for example, no mention was made of the derogatory depiction of vanishing ‘Indians’ with gin bottles.” And in the following year, “(t)here was a notable dearth of discussion about First Nations peoples in [The] Last Crossing.”

Tp sum up, Moss writes that, “The Canada Reads project needs to recognize that although the program may be ‘just a game’ as senior producer Talin Vartanian told me, it is a game played with cultural, social, and economic consequences.”

(Thanks to Bookninja.com for the link.)

Related links:
Click here for Laura Moss’s editorial in Canadian Literature
Click here for the CBC’s Canada Reads homepage